A chase through Minnesota's Boundary Waters

William Kent Krueger says that writing Fox Creek, the nineteenth of twemty Cork O'Conner novels, was a different experience for him because he wrote the opening scene without knowing the story or where it would go. In earlier O’Conner books, he had a clear idea of the plot, the characters, and the key incidents in the mystery before he began writing. Not only did he not know what was going to happen in Fox Creek, he discovered he was writing a thriller rather than a mystery.

He says that in a mystery the readers and the protagonist are on the same page in terms of what they know about the crime and the clues. Ideally the reader solves the crime along with the protagonist. Sometimes the reader knows long before the detective who killed Roger Ackroyd. Sometimes the detective has to explain everything in the last chapter. 

In a thriller, readers typically know what the villain or villains are trying to do ahead of the protagonist who is trying to stop them. It’s not a question of who done it or why done it but will the protagonists, the people the reader cares about, understand what’s going on in time to prevent it from happening. “What drives a thriller,” he says, “is the suspense.”

In Chapter 1, a stranger hires O'Conner to find his missing wife, Dolores Morriseau, only reasonable because Cork is a licensed private investigator in Tamarack County in northern Minnesota. This is the fictional gateway to the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a million acres of deep forest, a thousand lakes, and a few quiet towns. 

Within a few pages we learn that the stranger is not who he says he is; the woman he wants is on the run; Dolores, Cork's wife, and Henry Meloux, an elderly Ojibwa healer and woodsman have escaped into the wilderness; and three very bad men are chasing them and very bad things will happen to them if they're caught.

There are a couple mysteries: where is Dolores's husband? Why are the thugs willing to kill Cork's wife and Henry to capture Dolores? What's going on aside from Henry trying to keep the two women and himself alive? Henry knows the wilderness, but one of the three bad guys is a renegade tracker who also can read the wilderness—and is much younger than Henry.

To write much more risks spoiling Fox Creek for other readers, and I don't want to do that. I agree with Krueger that the book is more thriller than mystery. Yes, we don't know why the bad men want Dolores and her husband, but it almost doesn't matter. How will the villains be brought to justice? Read Fox Creek and find out.